“Expert disputes girls’ crime wave”

A world expert on women and crime says a “moral panic” about violent girls is seeing more of them arrested and jailed, even though evidence suggests they are actually becoming less violent.

Meda Chesney-Lind, a Hawaiian women’s studies professor who is in Auckland for a criminology conference, said the panic was fuelled by media firms appealing to chauvinist men by portraying women – especially black women – as violent.